Drivers ed: The First Step Towards Saving a Life
I
took a drivers ed course during the summer of my sophomore year
in high school where I learned both the practical and theoretical
elements of driving through both sessions in the classroom and on the
road. While I believe it is possible to learn skills such as backing
around the corner and parallel parking independently, I found that my
drivers ed course gave me a comprehensive coverage of the
rules, such as who has the right of way at a four-way stop and how
close you are allowed to park to a fire hydrant, which would have
been difficult to learn on my own. Paying attention in driver
education is important because it keeps people informed and prevents
many accidents from ever occurring in the first place: it is too
costly for a driver to learn classroom knowledge as a result of an
accident on the road.

Furthermore,
when I took my written exam for my driver’s license, I noticed that
the exam placed a heavy emphasis on memorizing technical skills and
had virtually no questions assessing understanding of behavioral
knowledge. In order to reduce the number of deaths related to
driving, I think it is important to also have questions that require
test takers to acknowledge the dangers of behaviors like texting or
eating and drinking while driving. Likewise, emphasizing the dangers
of distracted driving in the classroom would also help drivers be
cautious of their behavior. While I committed the often-mentioned
SMOG (signal, mirror, over-the-shoulder, and go) acronym to memory
for turning, I don’t have such a concrete memory device for
checking myself for distracted driving. External motivations such as
stricter, increased fines imposed by the government for distracted
driving might also contribute to the decrease in driving-related
deaths.
Safety
on the roads is everyone’s shared responsibility and I am fortunate
enough to have never been in a serious car accident; however, I have
been in the car during a couple of instances in which my friends were
driving irresponsibly. On the way back from rowing practice, for
example, my friends like to speed up the ramp to the freeway, often
accelerating upwards of 70 miles per hour before toning it down to
the legal 60 mile per hour limit. While I don’t blame my friends
entirely for this, since our society, especially the media, often
glamorizes fast and “showy” driving, I do call my friends out on
it whenever I can. Slowly, by changing our behaviors one at a time,
we can eventually steer society as a whole away from glorifying
dangerous driving habits and avoidable casualties.